Part 1: Find Your Why
By Frank T Shaw
What do you need to scale a business?
You need three things.
- Knowledge of your ideal fit customer
- A value proposition demonstrating you can solve your customer’s problem
- An effective buyer’s journey* that wins your customer’s business
When you know your customer, can convince them you have what they need, and know-how to close them, you have a recipe for repeatable and predictable business. You have a revenue engine.
The bad news
If one of these elements is unknown or unclear, your business will remain stuck in the quicksand of accidental deal-making. You will overspend on lead generation. You lose prospects because you aren’t speaking their language. It will take you months, not days, to close even small deals.
The good news
You don’t have to stay stuck. We have a repeatable three-step framework to help you build and start or restart your revenue engine in 120 days or less.
- Find your why
- Solve your what
- Execute your how
We’ve made the framework repeatable because creating a revenue engine is not a one-time activity. It takes a lot of experimentation. It may take multiple experiments to get your engine to start. Once it starts, you need to keep optimizing it to increase the velocity of your growth. The only way to increase the velocity is to do a lot of experimentation. So the more times you are able to successfully repeat the framework, the faster your stuck business will start growing Ready? Let’s begin.
1. Find Your Why (1 Day)
Finding the why helps you answer truths about your business, your market opportunity, and discover the root cause of why you are stuck. In this step, you are diagnosing your sick patient. Your business and its revenue engine.
We recommend you ask these questions from your customer’s point of view first. This forces you to get inside her head. Then ask these questions from your point of view.
You should treat the entire process of finding your why like a scientific inquiry. You are looking for causality.
See our five recommended questions to ask from your customer’s POV. We have a second set of five questions to ask yourself and your team.
From your customer’s POV
- Why does this business problem matter to me?
- Why can’t I solve this problem myself?
- Why am I interested in your solution?
- Why does your value proposition resonate with me?
- Why did I decide to become your customer?
From your company’s POV
- Why did I/we start this business?
- Why does our mission matter?
- Why are we able to attract customers?
- Why are we able to close deals?
- Why do our customers love our product/solution?
Our approach is inspired by a problem-solving method known as The Five Whys. It was popularized by Toyota engineers in Japan. They realized they realized that the first couple of solutions they found were really only surface solutions. These fixes didn’t get to the root cause of the problem. Digging down at five levels (more if necessary) gets past the superficial solutions and gets you to breakthrough solutions.
For this exercise, we don’t follow the Five Whys format 100%. But the questions do build on one another. They should help you dig deep into why your business is not growing.
Desired Outcome
You should find that answering each question will lead to more questions. This is intentional. You want to maximize your curiosity because doing so leads to insights you can take action on.
You should also find that you can’t answer every question. You may be missing critical data to get to the right insight. That’s Ok. Save these questions. Turn each data point into a task. We recommend you find all relevant data and answer outstanding questions before you start the next step in the framework.
Next Step
It’s time to find the data you need to answer any open questions. In our experience, it should take no more than two days to collect relevant data. Most of the data should come from your historicals. To find data you don’t have inhouse, you have four options.
- Customer interviews.**
- Internet research.
- Paid industry reports (if you can afford them).
- Hand-me-down industry reports (your advisors, colleagues, and peers want to help you).
If it takes you more than a few days to find the data to answer your open questions, you may be overthinking your answers. answer your open questions, you may be asking the wrong questions. If this is the case, don’t we can help. Contact us.
We recommend you take no more than 4 to 8 hours on the “Find the why” step in the framework. You could take several days. But it is better to move as fast as you can. A timebox forces focus.
One more thing. As a leader, you can do this exercise on your own. But in our experience, having your whole team (marketing, sales, customer service, and operations) participate will generate better and faster results.
Next up. Solve your what. We’ll cover step two of our framework in part two of this guide: Solve your what.
*A buyer’s journey represents the steps a customer takes to discover, consider and evaluate, and ultimately decide to purchase a new product/service. Your brand attempts to engage and convince your clients to buy your product/service.
**Your sales and customer service team members can help channel your customer voice if you can’t lock in interviews with enough of your customers.
Here to help
If you find part one of our framework helpful but are not sure how to apply it to your own business, let’s talk.
Request a free one-hour consultation ($850 value). Let us demonstrate how we can help ignite growth in your company.
What we cover in your free consultation:
- What’s preventing you from growing your business?
- What have you tried before, and why didn’t it work?
- Where do you want to go or be? What’s your vision?
- What resources do you currently have available?
- What’s your timeline?